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It's actually really easy to think of space as boring. The planets in our own solar system all seem to be empty rocks or balls of gas, and you find a whole lot of nothing before you get to the next star. Meanwhile, Hollywood's most creative minds can't get past populating the place with planets that look a whole lot like Earth (and specifically, parts of California) featuring monsters, rapey aliens or Muppets.
But real space is far, far stranger. You just have to know where to look to find things like ...

SETI will listen to newly discovered "Earthlike Planet"

An Earth-size planet has been spotted orbiting a nearby star at a distance that would makes it not too hot and not too cold — comfortable enough for life to exist, researchers announced today

Two Harvard engineers are to spray sun-reflecting chemical particles into the atmosphere to artificially cool the planet, using a balloon flying 80,000 feet over Fort Sumner, New Mexico. The field experiment in solar geoengineering aims to ultimately create a technology to replicate the observed effects of volcanoes that spew sulphates into the stratosphere, using sulphate aerosols to bounce sunlight back to space and decrease the temperature of the Earth.

A Japanese man is attempting to auction off the Earth on Yahoo Auctions, and it is over $100 million. The auction is full of amusing (or terrifying, depending on how you view it) little tidbits, such as how, in the product description, the seller claims the planet was given to him by God, so it’s now his to auction, then asks bidders to consult the shipping method. The item description also says that the seller requires bidders to give him a letter of purchase intent so he knows the bidders are serious about purchasing the item.

Using the game Planet Hunters, gamers have discovered two new planets in the Cygnus constellation.

In what is starting to look like the beginnings of a trend, casual gamers have helped scientists make significant discoveries through a specially designed game for the second time this month.

Real-time Satellites in Google Earth. There are 2271 Sattelites in orbit around the earth.

London, Sep 22: Power grids may crash, communication systems may collapse and Internet may shut down in 2013 as scientists warned that a huge solar flare is due to burst in 2013.

That astonishingly awesome claim comes from Dr. Richard B. Hoover, an astrobiologist at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, who says he has found conclusive evidence of alien life — fossils of bacteria found in an extremely rare class of meteorite called CI1 carbonaceous chondrites. (There are only nine such meteorites on planet Earth.) Hoover’s findings were published late Friday night in the Journal of Cosmology, a peer-reviewed scientific journal.